“The Mac cult, er, I mean, community seems to be of two minds about the fact the Apple has switched to Intel processors for its computers: One group seems to believe that this is tantamount to sacrilege and Apple has forever sullied its good name. The other group thinks that this is just the right move to motivate all those poor Windows suckers (the meager other 89 percent of all computer users) to finally move over to the Mac platform–also known to some as ‘the light side of the force,'” Daniel A. Begun blogs for CNET in a post headlined with “Heresy: Windows XP performance on a Mac.”
Begun writes, “While my vastly oversimplified exaggerations might incur the wrath of die-hard Mac fanatics, the truth is that the rest of us can easily enjoy the best of both the Mac and Windows XP worlds on a single system–as long as that system is an Intel Mac.”
MacDailyNews Take: Best of both worlds? What exactly is best about the Windows XP world? More applications. That’s it. Some developers make Windows-only applications. Of course, if they’re good and/or popular apps, they are usually found on both platforms, but there are some exceptions (AutoCAD, custom apps for businesses, etc.). Mac OS X has tens of thousands of applications available, but, still, WIndows does have more. Everything else however, from UI to stability to security to attention to detail, is “best” in Mac OS X. So the only thing Windows offers that Mac doesn’t is that it’s more “popular,” therefore it has more applications. And Fords have more aftermarket cup holders available for them than BMWs do, too. So, ironically, the only reason for the use of the word “best” in “best of both worlds” in regard to Windows is based on quantity, not quality.
Begun continues, “CNET Labs ran a few of its home-brewed benchmarks on a MacBook Pro with the Mac OS, Boot Camp, and Parallels Desktop to see how application performance stacks up between the three.
For our tests we used a 17-inch Apple MacBook Pro , running Mac OS X Version 10.4.6, with a 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo processor, 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM, a 100GB 7,200rpm hard drive, and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics chip. Boot Camp was set up with a 10GB partition for Windows XP; while the Windows XP virtual machine in Parallels was set up with a 20GB virtual disk.”
Full article and benchmarks here.
[UPDATE: 12:54pm EDT: Changed “Honda” to “Ford.” Honda was too good for the analogy.]
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